98% Preparation

The previous officers of our public interest society were incredibly disorganized. There is no organization to the office. Paperwork—very important paperwork, like the signed contract for recipients of the summer grants that we fund or the documents needed to file our tax return—is nowhere to be found. The computer was full of files like the resumes of previous officers and drafts of papers, but not a single copy of the program for the auction or the list of previous donors. Even the graphics used are missing.

How much soda and pizza should we order? No clue—there are no records of how much we ordered last year. In fact, we don’t even really know the exact number of admissions we had last year.

We’ve had to do everything for the upcoming auction from scratch. It’s been a huge pain in the posterior region. So, LaPresidente, Martin, and I are trying to track everything that we’re doing and record it all so that next year’s auction won’t have to be built from scratch. We’re also trying to over-organize this year’s auction to try and avoid the chaos of last year’s auction—which was basically a free-for-all on several levels.

Last week we sat down and mapped out in painstaking detail the jobs that will need to be done the day of the auction, what time they need to be done, estimated the time that each would take and the number of people that we would need. Then we drew up sign up sheets for each of these jobs(44 in total, not including the tasks for the officers and Martin and me), in hopes of getting people to take specific responsibility for some area instead of just saying “I’ll come and help”—which means that either they won’t show at all, they’ll show up and stay for maybe 20 minutes, or they’ll show up and need to be told exactly what to do and where to go. Plus we are hoping to spread the burden among a greater number of people than the three or four who always show up.

I created individual job descriptions for each position in the hopes that they will know what to do without needing to track down LaPresidente, who will have more than enough on her plate without needing to babysit some of the dingier members. We’re also hoping that having written guidelines will kind of shepherd people into doing what they’re being asked to do instead of standing around talking to their friends.

Not that all of our members are stupid or irresponsible. There are a few who are wonderful and you know you can count on them for anything. Most of the others will do something if you ask them directly and specifically. It’s just that there are a few who are apparently incapable of doing anything without being told exactly what to do and how and when and where.

As with all major projects, there are 10 million details to be taken care of, many of which can’t be done in advance. There are programs to be written, formatted, printed, folded, stapled, numbered, and grouped to ensure an orderly registration process. The lists of lots can’t be completed and formatted to be sent to the printers until the afternoon of the day before the auction because we receive donations right up until the day of the auction. The items that arrive on the actual day of the auction are put onto an addendum page (which has to be typed and printed and stuffed into each program). The items have to be grouped together into lots—no one is going to pay for a $10 dry cleaning gift certificate, but when you pair it together with tickets to a concert or a dinner at a fancy restaurant, you’ve got yourself a package. The lots have to be strategically arranged to spread the big and popular items out. Some items that are worth a lot, but that people might not realize exactly how much they are worth, have to be placed toward the latter half of the evening—when people will be drunk from the six kegs of beer we’ve ordered and more likely to think they can and should spend $1200 for a week in a resort in Florida. But if you put them too late in the evening, they’ll already have spent all of their money on other things and will be too drunk to pay attention. You have to get professors to agree to be auctioneers and schedule them strategically (“If we put Prof. MacPherson too late in the evening, he’ll be drunk and start talking about his sex life onstage again”).

And that just scratches the surface of it.

One of the jobs that I interviewed for after college was as an event planner for the Red Cross. At the time, I bowed out because their decision making process was taking so long. I’d already been out of work for several months and had a decent offer from someone else on the table. Now I wonder what it would have been like had I taken that job. I’ve enjoyed working on the auction, but I’ve hated it at the same time. It’s hard to imagine doing this as a full-time job, but at the same time, it might have been fun.

Anyway, the day after tomorrow is the big night. I’ll let you know how things go.